Davos

1. WEF’s mountain of money
2. What’s on today
3. Davos must-reads
4. Pricey rentals
5. Sightings and scenes
6. WEF conspiracies
7. Texting with Andrew Ross Sorkin

Davos Day 1

Welcome to the first edition of Semafor’s Davos Daily newsletter, where we’ll give you situational awareness on the Promenade, an agenda for the key panels and parties to get into (or pretend you did), and reported insight and, well, absurdity from our killer team of journalists here — our Liz Hoffman, Steve Clemons, Reed Albergotti, and Yinka Adegoke are all in town reporting and moderating and contributing to what we modestly believe is this small Swiss town’s best daily newspaper this week.

We’ll be watching this week for CEOs retreating from their social justice pledges, for high-stakes conversations about Ukraine and Gaza, and for AI promoters stomping cheerfully on the heads of the crypto promoters. And read on for the newest local fauna, the hot right-wing WEF obsessions, and a text from Andrew Ross Sorkin.

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— Ben Smith

Inside the Davos Money Machine

But before you sink into what is happening at the World Economic Forum, take a moment to appreciate the stunningly successful media business that is the World Economic Forum.

The WEF’s biggest financial problem these days is too much cash. It’s become a little embarrassing, in fact, for a Swiss non-profit to be sitting on a Scrooge-McDuck pile of Swiss francs that your employer, dear White Badger, is paying to get you here. Business partnerships begin at CHF 15,000 ($17,600), a spokesman said, and go up to CHF 600,000 ($705,000) for the annual subscriptions that include the right to spend tens of thousands more on tickets, as of 2017.

And so the Forum has been quietly buying some of the world’s most expensive real estate, in this case 300 km west in tony Cologny on the left bank of Lake Geneva.

According to Swiss property records that Semafor reviewed with the help of a reporter for the Swiss magazine Beobachter, Otto Hostettler, the Forum bought two properties on Cologny’s lakeside Chemin de Ruth in 2012 for a combined 24 million francs, adding to its existing compound. Another building, bought more recently in a transaction whose details weren’t immediately available, became its Villa Mundi conference facility. (The purchases have the side benefit of connecting Klaus Schwab’s home to his office, per the Davos critic Peter Goodman.)

They can afford it. The organization brought in nearly $500 million in revenue in the year ending March of 2023, and had a neat 200 million Swiss francs sitting in cash. Three executives who have studied Davos’s finances closely tell me the WEF would be valued at well over $1 billion as a for-profit company.

“Any surplus is fully reinvested into our initiatives and operations in the service of our mission,” WEF spokesman Yann Zopf said in response to emailed questions.

And competitors in the booming events trade eye Davos with a mixture of wonder and annoyance at its high-minded positioning.

“To replicate what Davos has done in other industries is incredibly difficult,” said Doug Emslie, the founder of the global events business Tarsus, which was sold to Informa last year for nearly $1 billion. When it comes to the brand, he said, “That Swiss neutrality is very helpful, and the fact that it’s not for profit is very helpful as well.”

Emslie added that he finds the not-for-profit designation confounding: “It’s just bullshit,” he said. “It’s companies that don’t pay tax.”

Given all that — who on the Promenade can begrudge Dr. Schwab for running the thing, well, not quite like any non-profit you’ve ever seen?

To wit: Thirteen of its executives earned more than $500,000 in 2021, the last year for which its U.S. tax returns are available, with Schwab and the Forum’s president, Borge Brende, each earning about $1 million. The report also discloses that “in exceptional situations the chairman, accompanied by his spouse, may be provided with private air travel” for reasons of “security or operational efficiency.”

— Ben and Liz

Agenda: Everything everywhere all at once

The theme of Davos this year is “Rebuilding Trust” and the program and the private conversations alike will revolve around the Forum’s iconic status as embodiment of the globalized establishment at a moment of rising nationalism and populism. The official program starts in earnest Tuesday morning, but here are some of the events to keep an eye on as you badge up and buy new gloves today.

5:30 pm: FT Sustainable Infrastructure Drinks, featuring European Commission Energy chief Kadri Simson and Heineken CEO Dolf van den Brink, at the Hard Rock Hotel.

6:00 pm: Everything Everywhere All At Once star Michelle Yeoh receives the forum’s Crystal award, at the Congress Centre.

7:00 pm: European Chief Sustainability Officers celebrate themselves at the CSO gala, at Schatzalp.

8:30 pm: Time Magazine kickoff party at the Alpengold Hotel. Marc Benioff might be footing the bill but he saves his big bucks for the still-nearly-impossible-to-attend Salesforce party later in the week.

Financier and Putin foe Bill Browder hosts his annual, high-powered dinner, having evaded any Interol red notices en route to the mountains. We’ll skip the exact time and location on this one!

Curtain Raisers

• National security officials gathered in Davos on Sunday to discuss Ukraine’s demands for ending the war with Russia. The talks, attended by officials from 83 countries, ended with no clear path forward ahead of the arrival of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on Tuesday.
• On the government side: “Perhaps the most heavyweight political figures set to be in attendance are China’s second-in-command Li Qiang, and French President Emmanuel Macron, who will both give special addresses,” judges CNBC, noting “politicians are increasingly wary of attending the event amid the ongoing cost of living crisis and with issues to tackle at home.”
• In the private sector, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is the unquestioned star, though Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla won’t have any trouble getting meetings. A pandemic hero, he’s now facing falling vaccine revenue and a weight-loss flop.
• “The spectre of a second Trump administration will loom over many of the panels, bilateral discussions and drinks parties during the week,” writes Reuters’ Peter Thal Larsen.
• The FT’s Gillian Tett wants Davos doomsayers to cheer up: I would urge it to add a “positive risks” section to its survey next year. It might not grab headlines, but investors could find it even more interesting.”
• Politico’s “dirty dozen” of “would-be autocrats, dictators, thugs, extortionists, misery merchants, spoilers and political pariahs” in attendance is headed by Argentinian President Javier Milei.
• On the eve of a conference themed around “Rebuilding Trust”, Edelman’s global survey of trust doesn’t show a lot of it. Just 22% of respondents, asked if they trusted businesses and NGOs to introduce innovations and governments to regulate them, said the process was “well managed.” Britain was at the bottom of Edelman’s Trust Barometer, with a score of 39% — below Argentina, where inflation is running at 200%.

Room Rates

Intel

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy arrives in Switzerland Monday to meet Swiss leaders and make his way to Davos. In the meantime, his deputies have opened security talks with Romanian officials in a Davos hotel suite.
• Nigerian President Bola Tinubu pulled out of the former in favor of his vice president, but the country is still planning a ‘Nigeria’s back!’ style Pavilion day with several senior government officials attending, Semafor Africa editor Yinka Adegoke reports. But as one potential Nigerian sponsor of the event told Yinka, the event was still in early stages of planning with 48 hours to go: “It’s always last minute with us.”
• The heroes of Canada’s far-right Rebel News posted a video of themselves bravely fending off a soft-spoken woman half their size asking them to move out of a parking space in front of a BlackRock sign. They are truly “in the lions den.” Thoughts and prayers.
• Indian attendees last year grumbled that the country’s branding had been diluted by a competition among regional leaders for attention at Davos, a phenomenon that looks likely to repeat itself: Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu and Telangana can each be found on the promenade. (Meanwhile, Kurdistan is among the promenade’s first-timers.)
• The New York Post and Daily Mail wrote pretty much the same story, again, this year: Global-elites-Davos-debauchery-caviar-champagne-escorts — based on the same aging, threadbare anecdotes, and making this place sound a lot more interesting than it is. Send us your new debauchery anecdotes at davos@semafor.com.
• New local fauna sighted while signing up for an event at Ukraine House:

Conspiracy

In recent years, far-right provocateurs have spread wild theories about Davos-hatched plans to make the public submit to globalist tyranny and eat bugs. This year’s topic of choice — dominating conversation on Elon Musk’s X about the Forum — is a panel Wednesday with global public health officials on “Disease X,” a hypothetical pandemic that could kill 20 times as many people as COVID-19. In reality, the concept was created in 2018 to help governments prepare for horrible diseases. In the fever swamps, “the powerful, maniacal minds populating the Davos gathering” may “attempt to foment another worldwide hysteria at Davos 2024.” Get ready for weird people to ambush you with tough questions about this hot new conspiracy.

One Good Text

Andrew Ross Sorkin is the editor-at-large of the New York Times’ DealBook and co-anchor of CNBC’s Squawk Box.

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